Page:Letters on Church Matters Vol 1.djvu/65

 Sinclair's letter is the prelude, is, I fear, the most effective way to bring this right into question, if not disrepute. There is no public ecclesiastical prosecutor-general; so that, if the mediate result of this visitation is to be, that the Bishop of London will find himself legally in a position to interfere authoritatively about certain practices in a selected number of churches, it must result from his having elicited a certain number of distinct and independent charges. These charges must have been preferred by some person or persons. The Archdeacons may perform the task of collecting them and embodying them in a form to lay before the Bishop, unless, indeed, they may, in this or that case, find themselves in the position of being at once informants and prosecutors.

We have now come back to the point at which we always find ourselves, after all—the great unfairness of constituting a one-sided tribunal for the redress of supposed infractions of the Rubrical law only upon the side which has happened to offend Lord John Russell, Mr. Drummond's butler, and Mr. Cuthbert, of "bottomless-pit" notoriety. Let it be knowrn that Archdeacons Sinclair and Hale are collecting their evidence as to infractions of the Rubric in this and that church; how can they, without blushing, refuse to report to the Bishop—if credible witnesses can be found to substantiate it—that in this church the prayer for the church militant is not read; in that, baptisms are not performed at the time ordered by the Rubric, or in the place the Canons bid; in a third, the Athanasian Creed is constantly omitted; in a fourth, Ascension Day (not to mention other church holidays) is suffered to pass unnoticed; that in all, the provision for public daily prayers and readings of Holy Scripture, so useful and consolatory, especially in a large city, and so expressly ordered in the same page of he Prayer Book which contains the direction for arbitration, which Archdeacon Sinclair misunderstands, is entirely ignored; or, to take one particular instance, that in a parish of which a dignitary is inclun bent, the illegal fee of two shillings and ten pence is exacted for every baptism, the result of which is, that children to a fearful number in that extensive parish remain unbaptized. How, I say, can the Archdeacons refuse to report such cases, and how can the Bishop decline to take any cognizance of them?

It may be that after all, the Archdeacons do not entertain those exaggerated notions of their powers which they appear, from the letter before the world, to have entertained; and that all they contemplate is bringing their powers of persuasion to bear with such force as to induce certain clergymen